Camp Cuisine

Camp Cuisine - Camping Recipes

Inspire your inner camp chef with recipes for camping trips. It doesn’t matter if it’s shared around a campfire, cooked in your RV's gourmet kitchen, or take-out from the local deli, food just tastes better on a camping vacation! Find and share more great camping recipes at CampingCafe.com

Truly American Foods

If you enjoy thinking about the first Thanksgiving and the foods the pilgrims and Native Americans might have put on the table, you might also like incorporating more of our native foods into your cuisine year-round. Many of the world's best ingredients come from North America, from herbs and flavorings to staples like corn, potatoes, and chiles. For your next dinner party, why not see if you can put together a meal that's completely native to our shores?

Food StaplesWhen European explorers first reached the shores of North America, they were excited to sample our local foods and take them back to their kings and queens at home. They returned to Europe with holds full of plants, bringing potatoes, corn (then called maize), tomatoes, peanuts, and avocados. While these foods met with mixed receptions in the European courts, it's easy to see that they caught on in time and became staples in European cooking.

A few hundred years later, Ireland was so exclusively planted with potatoes that when a blight struck, it caused a massive famine. European colonists took our warm-weather crops with them to their colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, where peanuts, hot peppers, papayas, onions, and tomatoes became so much a part of the cuisine and diet, locals would be shocked to hear that their distant ancestors had never tried these foods.

Read more about native foods and find recipes for a "native" American Thanksgiving feast on CampingCafe.com..